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naw-rúz (take 2)

March 24, 2007: 2 hours, 7 children, average age 7. We had a blast with this class—and it was mainly thanks to the help of certain blessed souls who were ready and willing to give up a day or more’s worth of time and effort in preparation to help make it a reality. The day started with prayers; like last year, we sang “Blessed is the Spot”. The kids’ conduct during prayers has greatly improved since we started focusing our efforts on that part of the class. Our main activity for the day was baking cookies—what better way to make Naw-ruz a special event? The children could scarcely believe their ears when we told them; they thought we were joking. But it was not so!

I asked my mom (of course) to come help us bake cookies. She prepared individual bags of three kinds of dough for each of the children, brought cookie cutters, rollers, trays, flour, decorations (i.e. sprinkles, different colours of icing, etc.) and so on. The children spent over an hour rolling the dough, cutting out different shapes (sometimes making up their own), and, once they were fully baked and cooled, decorating their munchable masterpieces. They took home bags of cookies to share with their parents, cousins and siblings. No joke—they were genuinely proud to have made their own cookies and were looking forward to sharing with their families. Some of the children had been so industrious in making the cookies, and had amassed such a stack of them, that they started sharing their cookies with anybody they could find. Here are some photos of the whole process:

Room for improvement? Well, we were actually expecting some parents to show up and share the afternoon with the children; lack of logistical coordination meant that didn’t happen. We didn’t spend nearly enough time reminding the parents that they were invited to stay; written invitations (instead of the verbal invites) would have helped tremendously. I had expected to give a more adult-centred presentation of Naw-Ruz, which subsequently bombed—meaning we didn’t have much of a “lesson” per se; once I noticed that the kids were getting bored of my waffling, we jumped right into washing our hands and getting ready for the cookies (which was the right thing to do, I suppose).

Kudos? Obviously, to Mom for basically planning the entire thing in about a day; she had even planned more (including making decorative bags) but we ran out of time! Many thanks go to Dad for taking photos. Also, big ups are owed to those who helped keep the class under control during transition time. One thing that was pulled off remarkably well this time was discipline. We’ve had some discipline problems with one child in particular, and it’s really taken all of us to handle him and run the rest of the class smoothly… This time around, it really seemed to work well. Not only did we avoid a tantrum (which had happened the previous week, when there were only two teachers available), we actually applied some of the lessons of Ruhi Book 3 and gave preference to the children who were showing patience and politeness. We had to do it several times, but it worked! I’m sure we’ll have to repeat the exercise in coming weeks, but it was a genuine thrill to know that yes, when you put your heads together, the lessons we’ve learned in our training actually do bear fruit!

2 thoughts on “naw-rúz (take 2)”

I don’t know what book you’re using but as a fellow neighborhood children’s class teacher I recommend Baha’i Crafts for Children-excellent book for ideas and ways to revise them.

I don’t know how many years the kids have been in the classes but just getting the lessons from Books 3 and 5 makes it so much easier then writing out lesson plans-it doesn’t save anytime with figuring out the crafts though.

hmmm….maybe create a calendar page with 20 large squares…createsome symbol related to the name of each Baha’i month or the significant Holy Day in the monthto place in each square each month.. or a notebook with a page with a quote to take home for each month…or… include a short prayer on theNaw-ruz tags.. they can wear them on the cord like a necklace… and then invite someone to share the prayer with them and the new person can keep the prayer tag…children can decorate the tags…to truly make the new first monthone of the splendour of the Light of the Beloved… through the light of the children’s efforts to ‘scatter abroad the fragrances of the words uttered…’